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Harvard’s First LEED Platinum Building

Yesterday I went on a tour of Harvard’s 46 Blackstone Street. The college’s first LEED Platinum building (now one of 39 LEED-certified projects at the college), it houses the college’s Office for Sustainability, Operations Center, and other administrative offices.

Green Building Services Coordinator Ben Myers discusses the building's history.

The site is made up of three buildings that surrounded the old Cambridge Electric Light steam plant. The architect combined the buildings (with glassed-in spaces connecting them) and transformed the space into offices. It was a $10 million renovation of 40,000 square feet, or about $250 per square foot, which is apparently pretty cheap for such a result.

The character of the exterior walls—including windows—is kept intact.

Runoff from the power plant had turned the site into a brownfield, and the college had to rip up the pavement from the parking lot and extract 18 inches of contaminated soil underneath. It was replaced with new fill and permeable paving, with microorganisms in the soil that digest any oil and sand at the bottom of a pond to filter any runoff before it reaches the Charles River. Native plants require no irrigation. Other features:

Geothermal cooling with ground source pumps provides cool water that runs through the building. Valance units on the ceiling allow convection cooling without the need for fans.

Demand-control ventilation with CO2 monitors saves energy and provides up to 100% outside air, with operable windows for summer use.

5 inches of spray-applied Icynene foam insulation (7 inches at the roof) helps reduce the size of the heating system.

Sub-metering allows monitoring of the energy use of many different parts of the building, with raw data collected by Siemens. The college is looking into using Lucid Design Group’s Building Dashboard to translate that data into more a user-friendly format and installing more green screens college-wide to pass that information on to buildings’ occupants.

The building initially performed much worse than the predicted energy model (30% worse in the first year), mostly because the architects didn’t take into account the need for the Operations Center to be running 24 hours a day, with heat-emitting servers requiring the use of the geothermal cooling pumps even throughout the winter. Once an air conditioner was installed on the roof for that room in particular, the pumps could be turned off from mid-October to April. Also, more equipment than anticipated was plugged in and left on overnight, which required some education and behavioral changes for the occupants. Now the building is performing 16% better than the model, and 43% better than code, in the summer—in both electricity and water use.

Most of the people on the tour were architects trying to figure out how to get every credit possible from the LEED system. I may not be an architect, but this is all very interesting to me in light of Berklee’s new building project, a 16-story building at 168 Mass. Ave. I haven’t seen any sustainability plans for it yet, but the architect is the same one who designed the LEED platinum Cambridge Public Library main branch, which seems promising.